Recently I've been playing with ffmpeg version N-35509-gfd36cbf to see how far we can go with encoding content in Apple Lossless. My experiences with flac tracks encoded with CD quality were really successful. Happy with the results, I took Stevie Wonder's album, "Innervisions", that is encoded as FLAC 96/24. Purchased from HDTracks. Unfortunately, the feedback wasn't positive, at all. Foobar2000 was giving an alert that encoder has terminated prematurely, so I decided to experiment via terminal. At firstt, it was unnable to load libfaac.dll, which I thought it could solve the problem, so I downloaded the file. Now I've tested once again, and here are the results, including the command used:

Please do not take into consideration metadata information extracted by the ffmpeg since it only sees the first FLAC tag. The question is, how one is able to encode ALAC content using hi resolution as the source? I have interest on encoding, either using the same atributes, or using diferent sample rates/bit depths.

Any help from an expert on ffmpeg is highly appreciated. At least we see some light on never being dependent on iTunes in case some ALAC is needed.

@Rollin: Yes, I've been sneaking around the subject something like two months ago thanks to Google. I should say I was surprised (to say the least) when I learned that Apple has changed Apple Lossless' license and released all format's specifications to the public, considering its reputation. Hope it is actually positive.

@lvqcl: I just have one word for this implementation: Flawless. Using it on Foobar right now, without hastles. Thanks for pointing it out.